Eat Club raises $5M for restaurant lunch deliveries

Forgot lunch and were planning on eating a box of Cheez-Its? Have your lunch delivered instead

Eat Club probably doesn’t even need marketing. I bet all it has to do is post pictures of delicious carne asada tacos on its site and customers hand over their credit card numbers en masse. At least that was my experience when I first saw the site, because tacos.

Eat Club, the startup that delivers restaurant quality meals to your office, announced Wednesday that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by August Capital, with help from First Round Capital, Siemer Ventures, GreatOaks Venture Capital, Launch Capital, Tekton Ventures, Mark Vadon (Co-Founder of Blue Nile & Zulily), and angel investors. First Round Capital led Eat Club’s $1.5 million seed round back in June 2011.

Eat Club works with a network of more than 100 restaurants throughout the Bay Area to curate a new assortment of 15 lunch options available for delivery every day. Users can order and get their meal delivered to their office between 11:30 am and 12:30 pm, without having to meet a minimum order size.

It’s a brilliant solution to the problem of what to do for lunch when you’re under a time crunch and you want something more creative than a Balance bar.

Eat Club currently works with restaurants like Curry Up Now, Ike’s Lair, Bon Chon, and Sonoma Chicken Coup. It delivers to over 1,500 Bay Area companies and provides corporate lunch programs for companies like Chegg, Bloomreach, Gunderson Dettmer, and IMVU.

CEO Frank Han says that Eat Club’s revenue has been growing at double-digit rates every month.

Interestingly, while Eat Club works with over 50 delivery reps and offers service in 12 cities, orders come with (mostly) free delivery. Some areas come with an extra $2 charge, and tips are optional (but you’ll tip if you’re a good person). So it sounds like Eat Club’s commission on orders is more than enough to cover the cost of delivery.

So what’s in it for the restaurants? It offers a new revenue stream as well as new customer exposure.

“EAT Club fuses technology to capitalize on untapped restaurant inventory and real-time member reviews & feedback to create a product that is simply awesome. Employees are no longer forced to eat a catered selection they didn't want, now each employee can select their individual EAT Club choice each day,” said August Capital partner Howard Hartenbaum, in a statement.